


Fortune like the Moon

by lucius_complex



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Blind Character, Classical Music, Eye-rolling alliterations, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Memory Loss, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 15:31:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5169029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucius_complex/pseuds/lucius_complex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A contaminated well is drained, but the hole in the earth remains. Somewhere a god is reborn, bereft of sight or memory, and idles the years away in dreams of being filled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Andante

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Frostiron's Big Bang festival and presented with much love to our little online community. I wished I had a little more time to work on it, but I hope you like it anyways.
> 
> All artwork by the lovely Nimohtar, who has been a joy to collaborate with. She has created not only the main pieces, but all the jigsaw page breakers that you see throughout the following four chapters. 
> 
> This work is written to accompany a soundtrack of the same name: http://8tracks.com/lucius-complex/fortune-of-the-moon. It will be uploaded as a separate work.

 

  **Fortune like the Moon**

****

 

_O Fortuna_ __  
velut luna  
statu variabilis

_O fortune,_

_Like the moon_

_You are ever changeable_

 

**PART ONE:** **Andante**

 

1

 

In his thirty-ninth year, Tony Stark discovered that Gods die as suns do, with an outpouring of brilliance that impaled the senses, a brilliance that had put out Tony’s eyes like torches dropped in oil, so that _no one_ could witness the death of Steve Rogers.

 

It was fitting, that the last sight he ever saw of his once-lover was the sight of Steve turning to stone as a hundred lasers pierced him through - lasers that perhaps Starktech had once upon a time helped one military or another refine. A warehouse suddenly bathed in impossible, celestial light.

 

It was fitting that it was _beautiful._ That even lifted into the air as Steve was by the sheer force of this skewering, he had struggled briefly to turn to Tony, cloaked under the calm certainty of death’s embrace. His eyes had been twin tongues of blue flame as his mouth had worked those final words: _live for me._

 

_Live for me._

 

After Steve’s death, his eyes had remained useless for three weeks; a world eclipsed in mourner’s shrouds whether Tony willed so or not. And so he’d had lain recovering under cool sheets, blinking away at the nothingness before him.

 

For three weeks, the only thing he could think of was how fitting it all was.

 

 _Live for me,_ Steve had said. _Compelled._ He couldn’t push it on somebody else - Tony had been the only one in the same room with him.

 

The only one who couldn’t save him.

 

It was well that his eyes should pay the price then, for daring to be there. For witnessing the expiry of a presence much purer than he would ever be, that he should ever deserve to see.Certainly the United States government agreed. After all they still owned the good captain (once man, now _god_ ) – and were happy to deify his memory. Earth needed her own immortals now that governments knew real gods had their own agendas, crumbled under their own feet of clay.

 

And dead men were much more malleable than live.

 

Tony neither attended the funeral nor visited Steve’s final resting place. He was grateful nobody had contradicted him whenever he’d quipped that there was quite literally, nothing for him to _see_ there.

 

*

 

When his eyesight was finally restored Tony had returned to the wreckage. The journey was pointless; it was long months after their enemy had been defeated. Long past any hope of resurrection. Still, he thought he’d make a pilgrimage of it.

 

The whole thing was exactly as he’d expected.

 

The iron structures of the former base had been unceremoniously stripped away; the remains of Steve’s body having long been moved to the Washington for internment, housed forever in a mausoleum as lifeless and marmoreal as the surface of the moon.

 

Despite this Tony wandered the premises for a desultory night and a day; seeking a sign, waiting for some second sense to suddenly rise out of him and identify _there_ –

 

 _There_ is Steve’ spirit, waiting for Tony to come back and find him. Just sleeping, hostless for now, but Tony would make him a new body, and then Steve would _truly_ be a god.

 

But Tony found nothing. All riches and the talent and wonder he’d inherited, a titan of the human race. All that, and he found nothing, not even a scrap of cloth.

 

It was early evening when he finally picked his way out of the destroyed shelter. The skies were as vast and even as the lines on a chart, and Tony stared at them without emotion.

 

There was nothing left to see.

 

Steve has left nothing of himself here on earth for him, even his spirit had been cast out – and Tony, who in thirty-nine years of life had never once had cause to bow to fate – now he had to bend. He had to submit for once, to fate. The will of the firmaments.

 

And so he sank to his knees in the dust and sand. Bitterly, so bitterly, he bowed his head to the sky.

 

His rage was a blind and useless thing. He could not fix this. Even Thor could not fix this. The Avengers could fight crime, but they could not stopper _death._

 

When he left the sealed area for the last time and went back to the city, Tony could feel the wheels of providence shifting: the impending descent of his fortune, slow but certain. America’s attitude towards him had violently shifted following Steve’s death. They had never approved of this heroes’ tryst; and now they found an appetite for punishment.

 

People spat at him in the streets. Sometimes they threw rotting fruit at him. He was informed soon after his discharge that his stocks had become as worthless at the pieces of paper they graced. No surprises there.

 

It was the price of his failure to save Steve Rogers, beloved of his people. The price of not being the one who died, for not taking Steve’s place.

 

Tony returned, packed up an old duffle bag that reminded him too much and not nearly enough of Steve Rogers, and left his once beloved country for good.

****

2

 

From the very tender shoots of youth he’d known the language of animals before he knew his own.  

 

He comprehends the language of the hummingbird and the crow, the dog’s lonely yowl, the urgent song of crickets crying out for a mate before their short lifespans end, so that they may live on in another. From his youngest days, he’d understood that this world was a plaintiff one, full of endless longing and regrets.

 

The name his parents had given, the _one_ thing they gave him before taking leave of this world is his Christian name, Lars.

 

It is not an exceptional name. For all that it was his only link to the family he will never come to know, Lars has never found his name familiar or musical, comforting or revealing. It is a functional enough name, like a tag and string.

 

As if he himself is an object thoughtlessly named and thoughtlessly released into the world, to grow as lonely weeds do.

 

And each time Lars whispers his name to himself, soft-shaping the words into the universe and trying to trace its echo –

 

He waits, but each time only silence returns.

 

*

 

As he grows older, Lars realizes other things about himself. He realizes that he can trace the rough bark with his fingertips and discern dangerously close the living age of trees. There are no truly old ones in his neighborhood. 

 

He realizes that he can always tell what sort of weather the day will bring. He can smell the lightning in the air, hours before the first crack of thunder breaks through the skies.

 

He realizes he can use the call of birds to guide his walks. That he can always rely on them to take him home.

 

He realizes that life will always rush past him, a thundering and enormous world of sound and industry far beyond his grasp and participation. He realizes that to be born blind as he is; to live upon the earth, but never to see it, is considered by many to be the worst sort of tragedy.

 

He realizes early on to learn how to hide from their pity.

 

He realizes that his dreams will always be of torture, no matter what kind of day he has, no matter if he had been happy or sad. Sometimes he dreams of dark waters, of a thousand hours of pain.

 

He learns to stay up long into the night, to listen in on the equable conversations of owls. Once, he joined a midnight class and tried to pick up some basic meditation, the art of emptying the mind.

 

But he learns nothing, save perhaps the disquieting notion that some vessels might be made to stay empty.  

 

*

 

He plays the last bars of the Adiago, feeling the movement cascading from refrain to refrain like running water. A cascade that slows to a gentle trickle, then to still waters. Something he can finally cross.

 

He often finds music to be a bridge, although to what, Lars has never been able to articulate. Not even in his compositions.

 

The presence of another gently intrudes upon his reverie, soft, supportive. ‘That’s magnificent, Lars. Is it a Barber piece as well?’

 

‘No, Mrs Auden. This is my own.’ He falters. ‘I can go back to the Barber if you like.’

 

‘Oh no. This one is just as lovely, perhaps even more so. Although a great deal lonelier, perhaps?’

 

He finds his head bowing, glad every now and then for the perpetual darkness of his world. He has heard of how penetrating people’s faces are; tries to imagine the twisting faces to accompany all the subtle range of tones, and wonders how the world _bears_ its own inquisitiveness.

 

‘I dunno,’ he finally shrugs. ‘It makes me think of lights. Memories.’

 

‘What a beautiful image,’ There is a smile in Mrs Auden’s voice, a tinge of marvel. ‘Lights and memories.’

 

‘Yes. Maybe.’

 

‘Oh, if my Tom could have been here to hear it, he’d have knocked on the doors of the Conservatorium until they took you in, my boy. I wish you’d not hide that talent in this dusty old place!’

 

‘I like it here, Mrs Auden. I wouldn’t leave.’

 

‘I’ll leave you to your practice then,’ the older lady said with a brief squeeze on his shoulder. ‘And my dear, someday someone will give you a good reason to spread your wings and go; you must remember to take it, when the time comes.’

 

 _Unlikely,_ he thinks, but Lars is too polite to say so. He picks up the next song on his practice sheet, but his mind drifts back to his composition.

 

_Light and memories._

 

What could there possibly be out there to see, if one is blind?

 

His fingers fly across the keys.

 

 _eH_ _Swirling together,_ a part of him whispers, _eternally out of reach._   Bright flakes of snow that melt upon the air before they touch his fingers.

 

He cannot fly. He cannot see. He cannot soar, save through music.

 

He turns the last practice sheet, teases the last notes out of the song, and closes the cover of his instrument, fingers brushing across polished rosewood in customary goodbye.

 

‘See you tomorrow, Lars!’

 

The proprietress of the Constance always seems to know when Lars is about to leave, even if he doesn’t make a sound. His face turns towards her voice as he picks up his hat and tips it over his head, the motion smooth with the aid of practice.

 

‘Goodbye, Mrs Auden,’ he says cordially, and begins to make his carefully memorized journey home. Unless he is deviating out of his usual path, he does not use a walking stick and his colleagues at the cafe have quickly learnt not to ask if he requires assistance.

 

It is three steps to the door, and he always switches his satchel to his non-dominant arm here, to hold the door open with his right. From there it is a left turn, with twenty-five steps to the bus stop.

Nothing changes, and that is the best thing about the Constance.

 

But today, Lars doesn’t go home the usual way.

 

Today, the door swings violently open before he touches it, and a stranger almost knocks him down.

 

The bells jangle a demented tune as a faceless spectral rudely snatches his hat from him. Lars opens is mouth to protest, but there is a sudden gust of wind, and someone says _‘you’_ in a voice with more pain and memory than Lars has ever encountered from anyone living or dead in his sixteen years of life.

 

*

 

3

 

They passed the first hour in silence, seated on his favorite park bench. Lars had hesitated to bring the stranger to his most comforting and often-visited spot, but the man had made clear he wasn’t leaving until they’d had a chat, and although the invitation was civilized there had been steel in his words; a lack of humor that bordered on threatening, behind the deceptive neutrality of his voice.

 

The man had introduced himself as Tony. He sounds old, although not elderly. His voice is not harsh, but it is colored with impatience and something brittle – something that vibrated at Lar’s senses as carrying with it more sentiments than warranted between two unknown people.

 

They sit. His new acquaintance is silent as the grave.

 

Amongst his friends, Lars is well known for a patience that borders on the eerie, but finally even he gives up on waiting for an introduction.

 

‘I’m sorry sir, but you speak as if you know me.’

 

‘I’d recognize you from Adam. Except,’ the man snorts, ‘it appears you no longer know yourself.’

 

‘With respect, sir,’ he says softly, ‘I think you may have mistaken me for another.’

 

‘Oh, you’re none too easy to mistake for someone else. Even at _this_ age. Turned back into a tender sapling, have you? Very convenient.’ The voice turns sneering. ‘What’s your name now?’

 

Lars feels his mouth fall open and answers more from surprise than any real desire to share an acquaintanceship. ‘Lars.’

 

‘ _What?_ Speak up, I don’t have good ears anymore.’

 

‘I said my name is Lars,’ the boy says in a strained voice. ‘And I’m rather certain that we’ve never met before, sir.’

 

‘That so, eh? Well, now we’ve met. In the bloody Tatras, of all places.’ There is a pause after his words, jittery and almost confused. ‘Come and help an old man walk.’

 

After a moment of expectant silence, he finally offers, ‘I’m blind, sir.’

 

‘No way for you to look down at me then, is there?’

 

He frowns at the stranger’s words, harsh beyond context. Clearly a bitter man with more anger than he knew how to handle. Perhaps he too, suffered from a disability of sorts, although from the sure sound of his footsteps Lars can tell he is not blind.

 

‘Where you do want to go?’

 

‘Doesn’t matter where I’m going, I’ve got all day to get there. Does it matter to _you?_ Running off to a hot date? Need to set someone’s house on fire? _’_

 

The mercurial nature of their conversation stumps him. _‘I-’_

Perhaps they stand there in the wind longer than he realizes, for his companion finally speaks and he sounds uncomfortable and hastily conciliatory.

 

‘Let’s get out of the cold at least. I’ll buy you dinner, what do you say to that?’

 

He’s about to say no, but something stoppers this instinctive reaction. Perhaps it is his curiosity.

 

The seconds tick by in his dark and often silent world, and Lars is bemused to find himself craving the company of a stranger. Sound he has in his life, but very little in the way of words.

 

Lars has nothing and no one, his life is one of solitude and listening; he goes home and goes to the café; he creates music for the lounge and music for himself. There is nothing else. If a man comes up to him and mistakes him for another, isn’t that still better than having no other?

 

‘This way,’ he says, and as they walk side by side he can’t help but wonder if the strange nature of their meeting would herald a bitter fruit or sweet.

 

*

 

‘So. You studying? Got a girlfriend? Or a pet?’

 

Lars shakes his head. ‘No pets. I finished high school last year. Now I play the piano thrice a week at Constance, and here on weekends.’

 

‘No shit.’

 

‘You are amused at peculiar things.’

 

‘This world’s a peculiar place,’ the man says blandly, although Lars can sense he means a great many things in those simple words, convoluted layers upon layers that the boy knows not how to read. He doubts he is supposed to.

 

‘And your parents?’

 

It is a beat before he answers. ‘They died in an accident when I was two. I do not remember them. I live alone.’

 

Most people would fill their voices with sympathy or shock at this juncture; the dismay of discovering a young blind boy alone in the world; but his new acquaintance moves on as if he’s said nothing out of the ordinary. ‘And do you have siblings?’

 

‘I used to have a brother before the accident, as I am told. But as mentioned, I am alone.’

 

‘I’ve always liked being an only child. So what do you feel like for dinner?’ Tony asks, signaling the end of their bizarre interview. ‘I’ll read you the menu-’

 

‘I know what they have here.’

 

‘Of course you do.’

 

‘I’ll have the chicken breast, thank you. Salad instead of fries.’

 

His mysterious host makes another sound of sardonic amusement. ‘And desserts?’

 

‘Apple pie, thank you.’

 

‘Apple-pie-thank-you,’ the stranger parrots with a snort. ‘So you’re really scrubbed clean of all the spicy bits, eh?

 

‘Pardon?’ Lars frowns, trying to decipher the constant stream of this man’s cryptic comments, but there is little to latch on to, and the man ignores him in favour of placing their orders with the waitress.

 

‘-and two apple pies. With vanilla ice cream. Haven’t had vanilla in an age. Haven’t had _any_ ice cream in an age.’

 

‘It’s too cold in this weather for most people,’ Lars says, wondering how old the man seated across him really is.

 

‘I’m not most people,’ his new acquaintance says, the sneer evident in his voice. He sounds scrambled, but also very sharp. The dissonance is giving Lars a headache.

 

He hears his own voice sharpening in frustration. ‘Then who are you? And why do you act as t-’

 

‘Excuse me,’ a pleasant baritone interrupts them. ‘I’m sorry to disturb your dinner my friend, but I saw your guest the piano player and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to say hello.’

 

‘No problem. Friend of yours?’ his guest asks, as Lars hunches further down into his coat in a vain bid to escape the attention. He has never enjoyed being identified, rare as such occasions are.

 

‘Alas, I am simply a loyal patron. Because of the music, you see. ’ He makes it sound as if Lars had given him something precious. ‘Your friend is most talented. Because of his playing, I have come to insist to anyone I meet: “it has to be here at Normadic, or not at all.”

 

‘It’s nothing at all,’ Lars replies, resisting the urge to twitch. On working days he flees the halls as soon as his shift was over, uncomfortable with the notion of casual chit-chat with the patrons.

 

‘Please, tonight I have bought some friends. I know you are not working, but it would be a great honor…’

 

Lars can feel his heart thudding with discomfort. He wants to say no; he wishes he’d never offered to bring Tony here. But his world has always been constrained by necessity, and there are not many warm places he knew to bring a stranger.

 

‘Of course I’ll play. If you wish.’

 

‘Do you need me to assist you to th-‘

 

Pushing the chair back, Lars quickly pulls his arm away before the man’s touch landed, voice sharpening in warning. ‘I can find it myself.’

 

He feels the heavy shadow moving away. ‘Of course. Of course, this is your establishment. My apologies.’

 

The room begins to clap as Lars makes his way awkwardly to the piano. He is coming from an unfamiliar angle, and he hasn’t carried his stick along. Outside of his first month acquaintance himself with the premise, it had never been necessary.

 

Until today.

 

The walk is uncomfortable, treacherous. He feels a hundred pairs of eyes upon him. The air seems to swim with expectancy and judgement, and he almost sways under the weight, until his fingers finally press against the cool smooth surface of his piano.

 

His one anchor, in a world of constantly buffeting waves.

 

‘Give us a soundtrack,’ someone pipes from the back of the room.

 

Lars exhales. He longs to slam the piano shut and run. Instead he plays them a reinterpreted version of _La valse d'amelie_ with a quicker, more whimsical rhythm, emulating the calls of swifts calling out to each other – searching for home. It starts out somber, but once he falls into the music, he begins to think of its elegiac tenor, vibrating out across the space, filling it with his own sense of solitude.

 

Music has ever been his only way to turn himself inside-out. To expose, to share, to remind the world of the boy who exists quietly beside them.

 

Yet it is suddenly too personal. Why should he reveal his true feelings to a crowd to be pitied, especially by that brash stranger? Whatever his feelings, he feels certain the world does not want to hear it.

 

So instead he chooses to reflect upon something new - the joys of first meetings, on the quickening of hearts. He thinks of strings that tangle together, fragile and unbreakable on his fingers. He thinks of the sharp breeze of spring on his cheeks, of the footfalls he hears on park bridges, walking in pairs.

 

When he finishes, the room explodes into sound.

 

His customary bow feels more awkward than usual, and he is forced to make a slower trek back to an unfamiliar table where his strange new friend is waiting. He sits down very carefully, aware of burning eyes on him that he cannot see.

 

‘I think you’ll find you’re more popular than you realise, Dancer.’

 

‘I’ll take your word for it, sir. From here it’s hard to tell.’

 

He almost smiles when the strained coughing sound informs him that Tony has choked on his drink.

 

‘Mouthy bastard. Call me Tony.’ His voice is rusty but warm, more watchful than any other Lars has encountered.

 

‘As you wish. Tony.’

 

He feels the pressure of Tony’s glass as it clinks against his own, together with the briefest brush of knuckles.

 

‘Cheers,’ is all his companion says, before lapsing back into a complex but companionable silence.

 

Lars settles onto his haunches, listening to the rhythmic music of the people around him; the dance of footsteps and clatter of knives. Tony is a silent but malleable presence, surrounding him like a wall.

 

He doesn’t say much. Lars finds that he likes it.

 

Here is a stranger that talks to him as if he’s lived a life filled with vicious deeds and terrible reckoning, instead of the empty shell he’s always inhabited. Lars wonders if he should be so terribly bemused to be mistaken for someone clearly so much more _– impactful._

 

Whoever this person was, he had clearly been powerful enough to have left deep groves that can still be heard vibrating in Tony’s voice, laid over with age as it is.

 

And if this man wants to pretend that he’s found this person again; well, it would be something for him too, Lar thinks, to play at being someone else for a little while – pass off the deeds and glories of others for his own.

 

Somehow such deception feels familiar to him, as if he’s done it before.

 

*


	2. Affettuoso

 

 

 _Nunc obdurat_  
et tunc curat  
ludo mentis aciem

_First oppresses,_

_Then you sooth_

_As fancy takes it_  

         

  **PART TWO:** **Affettuoso**

 4 

The chill of Spring swells into the mellow strains of summer, bringing home the last of the migratory swallows. They greet Lars with tales of their adventures abroad, and he puts their messages into music and sings it back to them.

 

As his favorite haunts in the park becomes busier, Lars begins inviting Tony home more so that the older man doesn’t feel so taxed by the constant walking and the weight of the sun. Somewhere along the way, they’ve started meeting regularly.

 

Sometimes they speak about idle things, skipping through random topics like weather and temperature and snippets heard on the news. Sometimes no conversation is necessary, and Loki is content to listen to the quiet sounds of breathing and intermittent broken mutter from Tony as he reads _(condemns)_ whatever piece of news or journal he’s brought along.

 

Somewhere along the way, Lars learns of Tony’s stage three Alzheimer’s.

 

‘Nature’s way of emptying out the garbage,’ Tony had said. Tony is currently on Memantine, has neurosurgical stimulators implanted into his scalp, and leaves his phone behind every few days.

 

After a month of tracing back their steps attempting to recover Tony’s lost possessions, Lars finally relinquishes his suspicions and decides that meeting at his small apartment, where he can navigate the space with ease and Tony will always find his things eventually, is simply easier on them both. 

 

*

 

To Lars’ surprise, his piano turns out to often be sufficient entertainment for them both. Lars will play, and Tony will listen, sometimes for hours without comment. He used to assume the older man had simply fallen asleep, but had been proven wrong enough times to realize that Tony appreciated music on multiple levels, and seemed to enjoyed analyzing anything from the bar counts of a concerto to the diverse personalities of musicians who created very similar music.

 

Lars tries not to smile to himself as he finishes the last notes on his newest composition, to the sound of a single pair of hands enthusiastically clapping. He huffs instead, trying for ironic and unaffected. By the chuckle that comes back to him, he knows he failed.

 

‘That is quite a thing of beauty you’ve managed to craft out for yourself,’ Tony marvels. ‘Why don’t you play it at the café?’

 

Lars flushes under a scrutiny he cannot see.  ‘People seldom have much appreciation for classical composition. Unlike you.’

 

‘A recent discovery, apparently,’ Tony drawls in his usual sardonic style, voice coming nearer. The man’s presence is like a warm blanket around his shoulders. ‘Believe it or not, I used to prefer the heavier stuff.’

 

‘All music has weight.’

 

There was a split second pause in Tony’s answer. 

 

‘So I’m learning,’ he says gruffly, and squeezes his fingers. It is a very small moment, a mere handful of seconds passing from touch to touch. A single beat of a raven’s wing, as Lars feels the weight of Tony’s hand on his, liquid and leathery and _alive._

He exhales, once Tony has turned back to his paper. Briefly, he clasp his hands close, to keep the warmth of that fleeting contact.

 

Loki knows for one like him, touch is to be treasured, horded. And so he makes sure it is etched forever into the blank and aching cavities of his heart, a brief scrawl on the walls that only seems to call attention to the loneliness within.

 

*

 

5

 

Lars thinks he dreams a lot, for a boy of sixteen.

 

He wakes in the middle of the night a lot, fingers trembling and heart thrumming as if he’d spent the night running from wolves instead of deep in slumber.

 

Sometimes he dreams that he is capable of sight.

 

He dreamt that once, he knew the shape and colour of trees. He dreamt of secrets that he hoarded, whispered into the craters of all the universes’ moons.

 

He wakes up twisted in a red haze of barely remembered hates – hate both given and received -  and the taste of metal in his teeth.

 

Not for the first time Lars wonders where do people like him come from. People so disconnected, living in a world they can never come to know; amidst people they will never see. People like him. All the blind and diseased, the poor and the deaf, had they been sent here into this life to wait out some obscure form of prison term?

 

But such thoughts were barely worth the scant moments he spared to entertain them.  He abhors self-pity, and there is always, _always_ more new music to write.

 

He shakes out the hollowness which always settles like fine dust on his chest and moves slowly towards the study. Already the first bars of music fall from his mind fully formed, a balm that soothes and distracts him.

 

He hums to himself, to keep his soul grounded and present. Here is the solid curve of his chair. Here is the smooth surface of the laptop he never shuts off. The robotic mono-voice tone greets Lars as he gratefully slides the earphones over his ears.

 

Like a buoy in the midst of tossing seas, his music anchors him, takes him to safety. He does not know what he would ever do without it. How he would live.

 

Silence he welcomes, for Lars has always been a solitary being, but the emptiness – it seemed to ask everything of him.

 

Like a payment once owed.

 

*

 

‘Hey I know this one!’

 

Lars hides his smile behind his coffee. ‘Pavane.’

 

‘Had a friend who used to listen to it.’ A shadow falls over Tony’s voice. ‘You artist types always gravitate towards the same things.’

 

A thread tugs at him, guilty, nebulous. Tony is insistent that they were acquainted once upon a time. Lars doesn’t mind such stories. They are always entertaining and makes the time to pass faster, and Tony’s voice is easy to fall into lull to.

 

Besides, the food is always better than what he can get on his own. Tony has an adventurous palate, and Loki finds himself exploring more restaurants and take aways in the last few months than his entire life. Ice-cream has featured prominently.

 

He turns around and raises an eyebrow at the vague direction of the sofa. ‘Is that your- _ah_ , probing analysis?’

 

Tony sounds like he is choking on something. ‘Hey did you just make a highbrow dick joke? Because I think you did.’

 

‘Such japes,’ Lars says dryly, but to his surprise it is met with honest and enthusiastic laughter, as if Lars has finally made the correct choice of response.

 

‘That’s more like it, Jingles Junior! We’ll make a proper man out of you yet.’ 

 

‘Will you put me into a loincloth and make me grow a mustache?’

 

The snort of disbelief is audible. ‘That’d be the day.’

 

‘What, you think me incapable of looking like a goat?’

 

‘Hah!’ Tony guffaws. ‘Thor will take one look at your sorry tuff and grow something twice as long-.’

 

And just like that a pin drop silence fills the space, and they are sharing a room with herds of faceless ghosts that suck up all the late summer warmth. They roll noiselessly into Loki’s living room like wheels and fill every inch of space with their graveyard presence.

 

‘Who is this Thor?’

 

Tony’s voice turns sullen. ‘Nobody. Nothing.’

 

Lars never knows how to reply when Tony brings out the past. ‘If this is something from when I don’t remember-’ he finally says carefully- 

 

‘Forget it,’ Tony says in a voice like leather scrap thin. Lars can hear him fiddling with the half dozen electronic devices in his lap.

 

‘But you can tell me, can’t you?’

 

Silence meets his question, and his temper snaps.

 

‘Just make something up then. I’m fucking tired of these abrupt silences.’

 

Lars seldom presses for information, but sometimes it feels like too much. Involuntary or otherwise, Tony is vulgar to bring these uninvited guests into his home.

 

True to his droll manners, it takes another long moment before Tony finally opens his mouth.

 

‘I’d tell you, but what’s the point? In a couple of years, we’ll be two peas in a memory pod, Dancer. Then we can make up all the stories we want.’

 

The things Tony tells him often make no sense, but Lars is getting accustomed to it. It’s probably an Alzheimer’s thing - fantasy and reality haphazardly slotting with each other, in the brain’s attempt to fill in a puzzle where random pieces are slowly vanishing one by one.

 

Silence fills the room; fills his lungs with something that is as deceiving as air in space. Lars can feel his fingers clenching into the soft cushion of his stool, holding on. He has always needed to brace against something, as if he had been born falling. Perhaps it is good that he has never seen the heights to which men climb.

 

‘You’re very unhappy, aren’t you,’ Tony finally says quietly to him. Tony does not apologize for his quirks and random forays into the past, but that does not mean he is unkind.

 

No. Despite his mercurial moods, he is the kindest man that Lars has ever met.

 

‘I don’t know how to tell,’ Lars admits somberly.

 

Yet it feels as if he’s admitting to something else.

 

*

 

Lars picks up a penchant for meeting Tony in park again during the early autumn months

 

They take long rambling walks with pocketsful of breadcrumbs; Tony nagging on and on until Lars finally gives up his pride and once again reclaims the habit of walking with a stick. It doesn’t feel so demeaning, with Tony walking beside him. There are days now where Lars can almost forget that he is different – excluded, from the rest of the world.

 

They have a system: when walking, Tony will do most of the talking. Once they get to the park bench however, it is Lars’ turn to lead the conversation.

 

For that reason alone, Lars is always careful to make sure all their forays into the park used the longest routes. He enjoys listening to Tony talk; far, far more than he ever intends to reveal.

 

Tony’s language is the one of birds; swift and excitable, criss-crossing in all directions like trade winds. His words are new and strange and well-experienced – his stories are that of a man who has seen a thousand setting suns from a thousand different places. He tells stories that sparkle like scattered gems in the darkness of Lars’ mind, birthing his imagination with new things previously unconsidered.

 

He has a way with metaphors that is alien to Lars, who read braille through a machine and first learnt to shape words from the music that he inherited from his mother’s ancient record collection.

Lars has always preferred music to words which he has always struggled with, having no visual to aid him and no emotive anchor save his own.

 

It is often difficult to put his thoughts and feelings to words, like assembling a jigsaw where he sees one thing and the world sees another, but through Tony he finds an interest and contentment in listening to the chatter of another that he never thought possible.

 

The swallows swoop down and tell him where the breeze is sweetest upon their wings. They tell of their preparation to go on their long journeys. He scatters his pocketful of seeds to the waiting pigeons who greet him as fondly as any lover.

 

‘So now you’re a bird person, huh?’

 

‘You sound as though you expected something else.’

 

‘Naw not really. Ok actually - I’d have pegged you to go for something else.’

 

Lars could feel his eyebows crawling up his forehead. ‘Something else?’

 

‘Yeah, something more… reptilian. ‘

 

‘I hate reptiles.’

 

‘Even the snake in your pants?’

 

‘I will trip you over with this stick if you tell me another dick joke,’ Lars says threateningly, but Tony merely laughs and drags him away by the arm.

 

*

 

 

6

 

‘I’m ordering,’ Tony says, voice slightly muffled by the receiver cradled in his ears. ‘Lunchbox?’

 

‘I could definitely murder a fries.’

 

‘Hmph. Bloodthirsty fledgling.’

 

‘Deathrow at least. So I think that deserves a double fries.’

 

‘You can have mine, o tasteless and bottomless spud feeder. But first somebody has a remaining – oh, fifteen minutes of practice to finish up. Comeon, Reindeer Games, chop chop! ’

 

‘I regret ever letting you into my home,’ Lars informs him as he turned back to the piano. He knows he’s good at keeping a straight face but it’s almost impossible to keep the smile out of his voice.

 

‘Like you’d ever satisfy those midnight rosti cravings without me. Hah.’

 

‘You just make me fat and lazy.’

 

‘Less talk and more playing, boy,’ is the only retort he receives before Tony’s footsteps draw away, presumably into the bedroom to place his orders in peace.

 

Lars shakes his head – with fifteen minutes left to go, it was scarcely necessary to shift through new practice material. He begins to play idly from memory, snatches of old compositions mostly written under moonlight on nights he couldn’t go back to bed. 

 

The afternoon air was mild and sweet. With his harmonic pedal firmly stuck in resonance position, he draws out a series of notes accented with a delicate string of weight, like chimes tossed upon the wind. First, delicacy. Then accelerando. Tony’s voice on the phone is a static hum somewhere in the distance.

 

Music is memories, a teacher had told him once. Only, sometimes he wishes he isn’t a person who feels things quite so strongly. Sometimes to play is to get into a vehicle whose capacity is not always known, and sometimes that vehicle can go too fast.

 

After a while, Lars finds himself trying to keep his fingers from visibly trembling as they sprint over the keys. Its briefly mystifying, before it veers abruptly into terrifying.

 

He shouldn’t have played music written in the Night, when his heart jacked like a rabbit and the ghosts of invisible things flitted before his eyes.  Who was he trying to impress?

 

He purses his lips, to try to keep them in. They come out so suddenly, like a tear in his pocket.  All the feelings that have nowhere to go, the hundred thousand heavy beats of his heart  that make him feel like he’s been somewhere else for a hundred thousand years before this one, lived a hundred thousand different lives before this one.

 

He sobs. _He know’s_ he’s felt them before _._ Whole and perfect, within these notes. His heart slowed in the moment, inside the music. It resided briefly between notes, at one with the harmony, at one with one sensation or other that he knows – _he just knows -_  

 

His fingers continue playing, although they are wet. He can almost see each individual sound, wrapped in silk and crystal, tears and compassion. Lars sucks in breath, he can feel his mouth fall open, sounds rising like a tide from within as his body carries itself further and deeper.

 

‘Frii-’

 

The gentle benediction of a queen. The unconditional love of a mother-

 

‘Hey,’ Tony’s hand was a sudden pulsing, almost unbearable weight on his own fingers.

 

Dissonance. Censure. Cessation.

 

His fingers clench on the keyboards, the keys he wants to tear apart for giving him so much and yet nothing at all

 

He hears a murmuring, a hand that wiped the tears from his face.

 

‘Easy there, Raindeer Games. Wouldn’t want you to get a heart attack.’

 

 _Would that be such a bad thing,_ he wonders? He had so little to live for.  A narrow bed which never warms. An older man who talks to him only because he mistakes Loki for another. Hopeless waiting. Speeches with birds.

 

‘I’m alright. Just got carried away.’

 

A squeeze on his shoulder, and he feels Tony leave, to go back to his customary place by the sofa.

 

‘That was some bone chilling piece. Why have I never heard you mention it?’

 

The question makes him restless and uneasy. Lars stretches and searches for the evasive crick in his neck

 

‘I don’t ever intend to make it public, so there’s no point.’

 

‘No point?’ the older man’s voice takes on an incredulous hue. ‘Do you ever listen to the soulless crap that’s out there? You can’t deprive them of your music, even if you think its crap. At least put it on Youtube or something; the studios will probably bang down your door.’

 

‘I didn’t say crap. I just don’t want to release it?’

 

‘Why?’ Tony’s voice is suddenly solid, penetrating. ‘Bad memories?’

 

He pauses, then shakes his head. Bloody stubborn gaffer.

 

‘Nightmares,’ he ruefully admits.

 

‘Ah. Well, too bad for you because I’ve recorded it on my cell,’ the plastic sounds of enthusiastic hand-phone fiddling follow. ‘…and I’m gonna send it off to a studio. What do you want to call it?’

 

Flattered and disquieted and unsure of which emotion is dominant, Lars decides to leave the decision in Tony’s hand and shrugs again. ‘I don’t care. Call it anything you like.’

 

‘Mmm. We’ll have to name it something adequately posh and existentialist. How about..  _a discourse on the pain and beauty of being.’_

 

‘A poet mechanic,’ Lars says wryly.

 

‘A murderous piano player,’ he retorts in reply, and finally breaks into laughter. He savors the way his lips stretch, the clench of his stomach as it heaves in mirth. His ears memorize the sound of Tony chuckling softly beside him. 

 

He hoards the memory of laughter, its realness.

  
Very much like a candle in the darkness.

 

*

 

It was not always laughter and long walks. Sometimes there was slammed doors and shouting when they couldn’t see eye to eye, or long silences that went on for a week whenever Tony goes missing.

 

He never explains his absences even for appointments missed; leaving Lars waiting on their park bench in growing chill for hours, waiting for the warmth of Tony’s hand on his shoulder to chase the cold from his bones.

 

But Tony doesn’t come. His phone goes unanswered when Loki fumbles with his seldom-used phone and finally punches the correct buttons after multiple attempts. This continues for days and days; Lars in the park pulling his jacket closer to him and making the slow trek home only when his fingers begin to shake from cold.

 

Tony never explains these absences, and what little gaps he fills come away fake and flaky, and Lars does not share his uncanny ability to detect a lie told in his presence. There had always been something deceptive about the man and usually he is able to ignore it –

 

But when Tony disappears… when he vanishes with no word, it is like being dropped into a dark and soundless well. It makes Lars feel _sealed up._

 

And so rather than reconcile himself to the biter truth, he takes these long, stubborn walks to the park bench, clutching two pairs of gloves and his walking stick.

 

And he waits.

 

*

 

‘Why are you sitting here by yourself, you idiot? You’ll freeze to death!’

 

Rather than reply, Lars clamps his lips together, shutting out the images of Tony driving away with in his rattling truck, his meager belongings in a knapsack at the boot. He imagines the horizons eating Tony up, carrying him away forever.

 

The pressure builds up within, until he is sick with it – the fear of sinking back into the cold and silence; the unbearable waiting.

 

‘Don’t you dare sit there and just ignore me,’ Tony says in his cold, heavy voice, and suddenly it’s just too much to take.

 

‘Why don’t you fucking get lost then?’ Lars suggests as emotions finally spills out of him, willpower unable to contain the words he sat on for so long.  His voice remains soft; not explosion but seepage, slowly gathering speed.

 

‘Is that how you’re going to talk to me? _Christ_ Lars, because- is it because you think- ’

 

‘What _I_ think doesn’t matter, it’s clearly _never_ mattered to you-’

 

‘What the fuck are you warbling on about?’ the older man cuts him off. ‘ I had a thing to go to, and sometimes the odd job takes me away. Don’t I always come back? What are you being so daft about –sulking? Pity party?’

 

‘Just. Go away.’

 

He can hear Tony rubbing his scalp in frustration. ‘So you want to just sit here in the cold with that plastic bag you call a jacket and hope that I’ll come back and be sorry? Is that how you think it works?’

 

‘Leave.’ He clutches stubbornly to the word; knowing it would keep him safe. ‘I need you to leave.’

 

‘Why?’

 

‘Because I’d thought you lost to me!’ he finally shouts, standing up so fast that he would lose is balance if Tony hadn’t grabbed hold of his waist. ‘I thought you would never come back again!’

 

‘You’re a damn fool,’ the older man whispers, and Lars hears love, hate, _fear._ He feels the thick padding of Tony’s overcoat pulled around them both; basks in the comforting circumference of a pair of arms that told him he is not alone.

 

‘LET GO! FUCK YOU! FUCK!’

 

‘This,’ Tony hisses stubbornly into his ear; pressing him closer, ‘this is called a goddamn _hug,_ and you’re going to learn how to give one, kapish? You stubborn fool!’

 

He struggles. He doesn’t want this. He wants this too much. Just as abruptly as it started, the fight goes out of him and he sinks his weight into Tony’s arms. His fingers wind around a warm neck, breath a cool vapor against hot wet lashes.

 

‘Don’t just leave like that,’ he finally utters into Tony’s jacket. ‘Take me along.’

 

‘I promise,’ Tony says, his words a low bassoon. ‘I promise. Now _please_ let me take you home.’

 

It is a bitter lie – ‘home’ for Lars is not a place with no one to share, but he pretends anyways.

 

‘You’re right. Let’s go home.’ And he allows the older man to link their arms together and walk back to the tiny apartment with the narrow bed and the piano, where they sit down on the sofa with the hot chocolate Tony makes in the kitchen, cursing at the lack of labels and threatening to rearrange everything; and Lars is the warmest and happiest he’s ever been but also the saddest. He could ask himself why this was so, but the answer comes to him before the questions are fully formed, as if from a script or from some fortune preordained.

 

And the answer when it comes, is an answer that destroys.

 

It comes to him as if he’s really been waiting for the right questions all along, as if it has been carved into his sinews before he was born.

 

He is in love.

 

He is in _love._

 

Tony’s voice is both harsh and warm, a hot spring, an engine. It is a sound that makes and unmakes everything in Lars – all that he’d managed to carefully keep under wraps and sleeping, like a seed waiting under gentle falling snow for a spring that would never come.

 

Lars can only describe it as _radiance_ , though he cannot see, and he is made terrified by its colossal, corroding power. The pain of it is a beautiful, transcendental thing, a melody that fills his heart with exaltation even as it pierces him to the bone.

 

It would be hard to live without, when the day comes. So hard.

 

Because he knows it will never be like this again, this hazy, haphazard glimpse of perfection. Of two people sitting together in silence, drinking hot chocolate. Winter will arrive, _has_ arrived; and like all the birds at his window Tony too will fly away – away from the inclement and featureless horizons of Lar’s frozen life, away from his inability to share more than his music with anyone, having neither seen brilliant colors nor bright cities, having never tasted the full course of life the way Tony had done.

 

The autumn chill seeps in, a stray and mournful wind that flutes through the window as Lars clutches his warm drink and trembles at the frost to come.

 

*

 

 


	3. Crescendo

**Fortune Like The Moon**

_Hac in hora_  
sine mora  
corde pulsum tangite!

 _(So at this hour_  
without delay  
pluck the vibrating strings!)

****

**PART THREE: C** **rescendo**

7

 

‘Do you really want your first crush to be an old man about to lose his wits?’

 

Lars slides the windows closed. In this chilly weather the ravens are the only birds left, and he has no endurance left in him to hear what they have to say.

 

‘That has already happened,’ he says to the man he loves, as boldly as he dares.

 

‘Hmmm,’ the speculative darkness that is Tony’s voice replies.  ‘You’re young. Talented and beautiful. You could do a lot better than some old mechanic you picked up in the streets.’

 

To which Lars replies: ‘You are no mechanic.’ 

 

He hears the muffled screams of the birds mocking him. The ravens beyond his window know both too much and too little. They like to speak of things they know nothing about, and Lars hates how they always take pains to remind him how little he belongs in the world he had been born to.

 

Once upon a time, he used to believe in their cawing claims. But he does not just belong to the cold and silence any longer, Lars tells himself. He has _options_ now. There is more in his life than just bearing witness to the call of birds; to the song of the universe in its unending churn, the growth and death of everything, pointless and eternal.  He can ignore the birds now, ignore the trees; ignore the hovering presence of ghosts that always seem to be hovering in the periphery of his sightless world.

 

He turns away from the window and moves towards Tony instead, Tony who is _human_ and feels warm to the touch.Tony whose wild, bittersweet memories flitter past his grasping fingers like leafs torn away by the breeze. Tony whose lavish life canvas is increasingly streaked and waterlogged, day by day diluting more and more of its once-vibrant colours. Until the day it returns a blank slate to Loars, wiped clean of both wisdom and remembrance.

 

By the time he closes the final distance between them and feels the warm gust of Tony’s breathing upon his cheek, Lars can picture them side by side, like two books on a shelf. The eternal dark and the blank white.

 

‘Hold me,’ he murmurs as fingers, then arms, interlock. He sways them to an invisible music, slow and sweet as the strain of a lute.

 

Tony allows himself to be drawn in. His breath is a warm fougière, scenting of tree bark and amber.

 

‘Are we dancing?’

 

‘If this is what dancing is, then I suppose we are dancing.’

 

‘And what does dancing lead to?’ the older man murmers. The dark, lancing blade of Tony’s amusement is for now, tempered by tenderness.

 

Lars can feel the corners of his mouth quirking. ‘Alas that I cannot lead.’  

 

A rusty chuckle tickles his cheek. ‘Well. We wouldn’t want the blind leading the blind, would we?’ Tony says, and then there is a finger on his lip, coarse, salty-  and then lips, hair, a gasp, _tongue,_ and Lars is swallowed whole. In these hungry, open-mouthed kisses his whole world narrows, turns taut and responsive and oh, he is alive, so very, very _alive._

The music between them starts out as a slow and muted reed, like a cor anglais, but it elicits and transmutes, moving sharper and more stridently into strings. And too soon even that starts to vibrate to the point of breaking apart, and Lars can feel himself squirming to every minute shift in Tony’s body, the kneading pressure of his fingers reminding him that he still has a _body_ , skin that flushes, mouth that keens; a heart that races-

 

‘Tony,’ he gasps into the other man’s open mouth, hot breath and wet lips. _‘Tony.’_

 

His entire world breaks apart and reforms. He feels a kind of terrified joy building low in his stomach, a cavity opening deep within that draws in the sensation of Tony’s kisses- latches on with a-

 

‘I cant.’

 

The kiss ends abruptly, like a tourniquet applied or oxygen suddenly turned off at the source. It leaves Lars breathless, _lost._

 

‘I can’t,’the older man breaths, ‘Gods, I thought I could, but I _can’t.’_

 

Lars finds his fingers latching onto Tony’s shirt. _Desperation._ Somehow he almost expects it, when Tony finally pushes him away.

 

 _‘_ Don’t-’

 

‘You’re not _him,’_ Tony bites out. Almost yells.

 

He feels his heart stop. He feels something let go, fingers releasing into a void.

 

‘Oh.’

 

His heart starts again, fingers peeling away from familiar coat lapels.

 

‘Lars-’

 

‘Who am I _not?_ ’ he interrupts. His heart twitches once, not exactly pain, no. But it is a physical sensation, like a stitch. The air between them becomes as awkward as one of his concerts.

 

He can sense Tony deciding how much he wants to share. ‘I’m wondering,’ the rough voice says instead, ‘if I should give you back to your family.’

 

This makes him almost want to laugh. ‘You know I don’t have one.’  

 

 _You are the only family I have,_ he doesn’t say.

 

‘Not that family,’ Tony scoffs. Lars waits for him to expand on that cryptic statement, but Tony falls silent.

 

Finally he asks gently, so gently:

 

‘What is it you wish to tell me?’

 

‘I don’t remember,’ Tony says after a pause. The clatter and rattle of bottles follows. ‘I need my Memantine.’

 

Lars allows the silence to envelop them. The space hums of sadness, like a requiem of passing seasons. He tells himself he can deal with rejection.  That he doesn’t need Tony to love him back to be in love himself; that nothing will change between them even with this revelation.

 

Somehow he also knows that he has always had a great skill in the art of self-deception.

 

A quiet descends. It is an unlovely quiet, one that makes his breathing tight and scrapes at the cavities of his chest. His fingers dig into the wooden curve of his chair, to keep them from rubbing at his torso. Such an act would be too obvious a weakness. Too much for Tony, who hates weaknesses of any sort.

 

He concentrates on his breathing instead. Listening to the sounds of the older man swallowing his pills is a prosaic, calming thing.

 

‘This can’t go on.’ Tony finally says. Blusters, really. ‘Don’t blame yourself because its not you. I- I’m not- too much time has passed. We’re both not who we were.’

 

Lars shrugs. ‘Very well.’

 

Its ok. Its _ok._ He’ll just go back to being whoever he was. Before.

 

Lars can almost tell himself that however quiet it gets, it is still better than the complete and blanketing scream of loneliness. 

 

Did he not always know in his heart how this charade would end?

 

‘The past doesn’t matter anymore,’ he suddenly catches Tony saying. Lars is not certain he’s caught everything.

 

‘I’ve lost hold of all sense of time anyways. Or will soon. There’s no point… doing this, if a week from now I don’t even remember why I did it.’

 

Did what, Lars wonders. Befriend and kiss a blind boy? Break someone’s heart?

 

Unbidden, his mouth tries to smile, attempting to cover its hurts.

 

‘Time is a cruel god.’

 

‘Some things are crueler,’ Tony says in a voice stained dark and rich with an ancient anger. Lars has no barometer for the depth of such wrath. He cannot, he thinks, exhume such a past. He cannot compete with so immense and powerful a spectral as his _other_ self.

 

‘So it seems.’

 

Defeated, he turns himself towards the corridor leading to his bedroom, pivoting on the back of one of his carefully placed chairs to track his direction. ‘I am tired. Please let yourself out.’

 

_‘Lars.’_

 

‘I’ll be all right.’ For the first time in years, Lars feels the mewling, feather light-weight of his years, his naiveté and lack of experiences – a shame that blisters his skin – and wishes for the security of his walking stick.

 

He has been so very young, and so very _stupid._

 

‘It’s not you. I swear it’s not,’ Tony says. Cajoles. His voice reveals a soul torn in two.

 

‘It’s all right Tony. Just go.’

 

Tony picks up his things and clears his throat. ‘Not everything in the world has an explanation.Not everything is so simple.’

 

‘Sometimes,’ the boy says softly before closing the door, ‘I wonder which of us is blind, and cannot see.’

 

*

  **[Interlude: A letter from New York]**

 

Dear Mister Lars,

 

I hope you will forgive the multiple mistakes I will no doubt make in this letter. We’ve never used a braille machine before, and I’m afraid it has put my office in a kurfuffle trying to figure it out.

 

But now to business: my name is Thomas and I am an old friend of Tony Stark. We met several decades ago when I was a stranger in New York struggling to master the eddies and flows of this great city. Suffice to say he helped me a great deal, and I owe him too much to not take immediate interest when he contacted me a few weeks ago, speaking of a young boy from a small town in the Tatras who wrote music with the power to break or heal the human heart.  Although I’ve yet to hear your music, in all our years of friendship I’ve never known Tony to describe music in such a manner.   

 

Let me get right to the point. I happen to own a record company in New York, one that specializes in composition. To put it very simply, me and mine would be very interested in arranging for your music to reach a wider audience. We believe this might be an exciting opportunity for you, as through us you can access some of the best equipment and resources a composer of your caliber might need to develop his craft.

 

I was given to understand by Tony that you are a rather private individual – rest assured that should you choose to release your music to us, we will do everything in our power to see to a distribution that is both widespread and discrete.

 

If you are willing to consider travel, we will be happy to fly you into New York this autumn to further peruse terms, although I grant that the distance might prove challenging for your particular circumstance.  I do not doubt however that you’ll find a certain mutual friend more than ready to assist. I’ve always been one to bang into things myself, but my own kind wife has always been invaluable in lending me her sharper senses. Tis a great thing, is it not? To have someone whom we can utterly be our whole selves with?

 

I look forward to hearing from you.

 

Your servant,

Thomas Orion

 

*

 

 

‘Mrs Auden, I- I’d like to beg off tonight’s performance as well, if you don’t mind.’

 

Concern instantly floods the receiver. ‘My dear boy, are you well? Shall I send Tom to you?’

 

‘Oh no. No I’m fine.’ Lars shakes his head, bemused. ‘Just a little under the weather.’

 

‘Do bundle up, Lars, the chill is descending quickly. A strange frost we’re having this year.’

 

Strange and sharp, Lars thinks. He tries unsuccessfully to muffle a cough. ‘I’ll do that, thanks.’

 

Mrs Auden makes a little noise in acknowledgment, before hesitating. ‘Are you going to be all right?’ she finally asks. ‘You don’t sound at all well.’

 

Lars pauses. And then he says honestly for the first time: ‘I don’t know, Mrs Auden. I honestly don’t know.’

 

He disconnects the line quickly before he gives more of himself away, and makes his way shakily to the bedroom, hand hugging the walls for reassurance, like he used to do as a child.

 

His heart feels strange and fragile sitting in the cavities of his chest, like it has recently shifted spots. Like it had to suddenly flee in the dark of the night and injured itself in the haste to relocate. His ribcage feels heavy, as if his body cannot yet accommodate this new position.

 

Everything is tender and sore. How do the broken-hearted endure such pain? He feels almost as if somebody has ripped out all his vital organs and everything is now exposed. Veins and ventricles and tubes, all poking out of him.

 

He remembers Mr Auden’s funeral, the perfumed smoke of thuribles and hard pew seats. He remembers Mrs Auden’s words as he escorted her into the car; her fragile, birdlike fingers gripping on to his coatsleeves.

 

‘We shall endure, Lars. We shall hold onto everything he loved, and _remember_ , for his sake.’

It is the main reason why the Constance still exists, why everything from the tinkling glassware to the mid-century, Stieff square that Lars played every weeknight will never, ever be replaced.

 

_We shall endure._

 

It is winter, but the birds will one day return to him.

 

*

 

8

 

He bolts awake again, chased by the cries of birds.

Lars thought he’d heard a name being uttered in his dream. The birds were screaming, cawing it to the skies; the sound of it filled his mouth with bile, saliva that tasted of blood and rust.

 

‘L---,’ they say. ‘L----’, and he knows they cry out not just a name, but _a curse_.

They utter it at him, over and over again, flashing red and fleshy like a Morse code that hurts his head.

 

‘L---’.

 

‘L---’ It is a bell in his head, the chromatic, shattering sound of it.

 

‘L---’

 

He might be screaming, but he doesn’t know, cannot tell. Lars hears it, the sinuous but swift way it strikes against the roof of the mouth like a serpent.

 

‘L---’

 

_God help his heart._

It is a voiceless calling that does not reveal, does not relent. Despite the winter chill, sweat continues to break out of him. He thinks he must have been running in his dreams, running even awake.

 

He stumbles in his dreams. Things falls; glass shatters, slicing his feet. He can’t find his way. Time too, is not the same here, it shifts like quicksand. There is now space between moments, hollow and gaping, like manholes he can fall into and never be found again.

 

He has nothing, no weapons to use against such agony. He is alone, alone, his b------ will not come, T--- will not come-

 

‘L----,’ they call to him, over and over again. Lars feels as if his lungs will collapse. There is darkness. So much darkness. The night is a blanket, unendurable. Even if all he has ever known is night and night and night, this is different. This is not night, but _Night._

 

Trembling his hand reaches out, his mouth shaping empty syllables. His mind is so terribly _blank, is this how Tony feels when he forgets, is this how Tony feels, is this how Tony feels- is this how T---_

_-is this how T---_

_-how T---_

_He has no b----- here._

_‘Help me! Please! Help!’_

Curtains in his fingers, scrabbling at the latches. His nails are torn, Lars dimly registers.

 

‘L---, L---, L---’ , the ravens cry, louder, harsher. They fill his ears with icy stones and put their beaks into his eyes. Their bills drip warm and wet and he knows the sound of that colour in his heart. Knows how it flows through his veins.

 

He tries to hum the opening bar from his favorite composition and fails. He cannot reach his music here. It has always been his only consolation, but now even that is too far, much too far away - music requires his rational mind and working limbs and Lars is helpless, helpless – curtains curling around his fingers, and his cries of help are to _nobody_ – an abstract and pitiless god.

 

‘Please, please _oh god._ Merciful god, _I beg – I beg you. I beg you.’_

 

All the answer he gets is the vicious beating of wings on his window like a hail attempting to break into his room.

 

_No, L---_

_No, L---_

_No Tony either._ No Tony, he has never been there. It has all been in his head, Lars has made him up, a dark heart to match his dark delusions. Poor boy. Poor lonely pitiful boy.

 

_No, L---_

 

Again and again Lars shapes the words - meaningless without memory, and comes up against the same drowning glass. He knows they are ravens from their strident cries - the only thing that transcended the spheres of waking life and dreams.

 

He screams until a something shatters, screams till something within him splinters into a thousand pieces and Lars is screaming still when a pair of strong arms gathers him into a crushing embrace, bracing like steel and the familiar scent of smoked oak and moss. Until the sweet, low bassoon of Tony’s voice gusts against his ear.

 

‘Lars. Lars. It’s just a dream. A dream.’

 

Lars weeps, choking on a great lungful of air.

 

 _‘Shhh._ I’m here. I’m here, it’s all over.’

 

There are hands in his hair. There is the rasp of bristles on his cheek, lips that feather his brow, paper thin and tender as dove feathers.

 

 _‘Breathe_ , Lars. Breathe. That’s it. Good.’

 

There is silence, and strong warm arms around him. A heart that beats beside his own.

 

He opens his mouth and sucks in air, sharp as glass. He’s not alone.

 

There are no birds.

 

*

 

 

 

 


	4. Triste

 

Sors immanis  
et inanis,  
rota tu volubilis

 _(Fate – monstrous_ __  
and empty,  
a whirling wheel)

   

**PART FOUR: Triste**

9

 

Although he can’t see it, he knows he’s not facing Tony. That he’s currently avoiding the mingle of their breaths by tilting his head away and staring out of the window.

 

‘Lars,’ Tony’s words vibrate at him, an edge of command creeping into his voice. He wonders if Tony has ever been in the military. It seems to suit him.  ‘Look. I know this is a bad time.’

 

‘Tony. _Just_ stop. I don’t want to talk about it. _’_

 

Just thinking about it is bad enough.

 

Each night, he’ll go to sleep with the promise that he will never break apart just because of a nightmare. That he’ll never scream, no matter what his memories dredges up from the murk of remembrances. Yet he’s broken every promise he’s ever whispered to himself in the deep slump of the night.

 

Tony makes him hold the vial in his hands. ‘You need to listen anyway.’

 

‘What is the point of this?’ Lars asks him tiredly.

 

Tony is affecting a calm façade, but Lars can feel the tension that he tries so hard to keep out of his voice, soaring on minor keys and chromatics.

‘Look, I wouldn’t _do_ this. Not for you. But your brother… was a friend.’

 

‘My brother,’ Lars echoes blankly.

 

‘Thor.’

 

_‘My brother.’_

 

Tony’s grip tightens on his fingers, harsh and unforgiving. ‘Stop it. I want you to listen very careful to me. Hold it, feel it in your hands, and _listen.’_

‘I don’t-‘

 

 _‘_ Why’s it so goddam hard for you not to judge for two seconds?’

 

‘A Norse comic figure and some costumed American on steroids,’ Lars elucidates with some amusement. ‘Tony, where do you think you are going with this?’

 

Tony sighs. ‘I need you to remember your _brother_ , Lars. Remember Thor. Otherwise I can’t... I don’t think you deserve this.’

 

The words echo back at him. They have a colour. Blood and gilt and a crash of thunder like rows of cymbals. An orchestra. A _wave._

 

‘This vial, the contents of this vial comes from Asgard,’ Tony says each word slowly, the weight of unseen spectral behind him. Lars can feel their eyes on them both. ‘It comes from your mother, the queen of Asgard. _No dammit, listen to me,_ this is not a bedtime story _._ It comes from your _mother,_ and your _brother.’_

 

He finally grips the vial and ask into the quiet: ‘How long have you had this? And why did you wait?’

 

‘About five months. I went back to New York.’ Tony’s voice turns a deep cerulean blue. ‘I met your brother.’

 

Lars doesn’t believe, of course. He doesn’t.

 

‘So he’s… here? This… Thor? On earth?’

 

‘Thor hasn’t been around for years and years. The last thing he did on earth was sentence you. We never saw him again-‘ Tony’s voice sours, ‘-until I went back to New York, and then he just appeared in my tower. Like he’d _planned_ all this out from the get go.’

 

He feels Tony pull away, and is glad the man is too distracted to sense the loss overcoming him. He hides his hands in his sweater sleeves, vial tucked between his fingers.

 

‘How does he look?’

 

‘The same. He looked… the same. But quiet.’

 

‘I see.’

 

‘You don’t. You _cant.’_ The older man laughs, angry and bitter. A thing – wooden, was hurled against the wall, breaking with a violent clack. ‘You don’t know how much I _hate-‘_

 

Lars flinches, but he can feel Tony do the same, hear the rustle of his hair. The regret on his breath.

 

‘I told you. I said _it’s not you.’_

 

He cannot help the bitter snort. ‘Except that it is.’

 

‘Yes,’ Tony breathes. ‘It _is_ you. I know it is. And I want- I _hate everything about you._ Every single thing you’ve ever done to me and to everyone else. And Steve.’

 

Idly Lars allows a finger to escape, to trace an errant vein on Tony’s knuckle. What is there to say? They are both surrounded by ghosts.

 

‘I care a great deal about you,’ Tony says, flexing his hands so that Lars can chase the protruding vein from knuckle to wrist bone.

 

‘What do you want me to do? I mean with this.’

 

The older man sniffs. ‘It’s yours, Jingles. Do with it what you will.’

 

Lars stays silent. There is nothing to say to the wall of Tony’s pretense of indifference, Tony who has a far bigger stake in this strange and terrible past life than Lars will ever have.

 

He is still holding the vial in both hands when he feels Tony rustle closer; cupping his own rough fingers around his hands. Solid. Warm. Insistent. 

 

‘When you are ready.’

 

Curious, he shakes the vial. ‘What is it?’

 

‘It’s… your eyes.’

 

His heart leaps, he knows not why, but he believes every ludicrous word that Tony says.

 

‘Don’t be crazy. This is not a joke.’

 

‘Do I sound like I’m joking to you?’ Tony’s voice is truculent, like a hammer to the silence in the room. ‘Thor told me it’s not permanent. Twenty-four hours, to be exact.’

 

‘As spells tend to be,’ Lars mutters dryly. His fingers caress the smooth and brittle glass. Does he care? Of course.

 

But-

 

He wants to move on. Its Tony that cares about the past – Lars never _had_ one. The future was impossible to envision. The only thing that belongs to him is the present; whatever happens now.

 

Perhaps everything Tony has been saying is true, and Lars is truly a fallen god who will regain his memories and suddenly have a brother. Perhaps he’ll finally get to see Tony’s smile, the smile he can sometimes hear in that voice, imagine in the trace of his fingertips.  Perhaps the sight of his own reflection in the mirror will cut him to the bone. Or perhaps nothing will happen – Lars thinks he can live well within each supposition.

 

The contents of the vial feel strangely sluggish in his hand, like a runny rubbery thing. He feels the swirl of the liquid, but it is two beats behind time and strangely thick.

 

He makes a decision.

 

The strange stopper comes out easily with a twist and Tony barks, ‘Don’t waste it!’ but Lars just smiles and tips it out; he will see Stark at last, after months untold – he will see the smile, long imagined between long meandering park walks and a hundred train rides, shoulder to shoulder-

 

And then his eyes **open.**

 

 _(‘_ Loki,‘ Thor says. _‘Brother.’)_

_(A bird screams and takes flight)_

_(A shield shatters; blue and silver, red with blood)_

_(A hammer cracks a skull open)_

_(His mother’s tears)_

The answers pour out of him from sources he knew not, as if pockets of repositories that had been sewed up, an age ago, in the throes of sleep or before he was released into birth were finally ripped free– they seep out of him like water, carried by currents  - it almost feels like he would perhaps chance upon his missing eyes amongst them, his missing voice. His missing heart, his missing b-------

 

 

His life has always been accompanied by music, for better or for worse. For L---, the music of things was where fact and truth and beauty resides. Yet for the first time in his life the world is utterly silent.

 

 _Utterly_ silent.

 

‘Loki.’

 

Loki looks up, and when his heart breaks open, it does so without quietly, without a sound.

 

(It is but a moment of spellwork, Thor had said - oh but how it un-does his _life_ , his inadequate, _hopeless_ heart.)

 

Tony returns his gaze, honest at last.

 

Loki looks. He sees a face worn down with lines to the bone; ghostly, stiff, unsmiling. He does not see the voice of the man he thought he loved in Tony Stark’s face.

 

He sees the work of his old self still at work after all these years, steadily eroding, losses carved into the face of a cliff with chisel and pike, pockmarked with detonations of hate and retribution. Time had soothed over some of the harshness, but most of it remains, rounded over like rocks in the dessert.

 

He sees the hate Stark still bears for him – that he had successfully scoured out of his voice, but not his eyes. Not his eyes.

 

Those angry, beautiful eyes that loved Loki _not._

 

In looks Stark is much older than his 56 years of age, a hundred times more of his voice, and Loki can’t help but wonder, who is the trickster now?

 

He speaks carefully, so his voice doesn’t shake when he asks the question he _must_ , even if the price is laughter.

 

‘Was it for revenge that you sought me out?’

 

‘I didn’t seek you out,’ Stark tells him. He says it calmly, as if reciting the answers from a script. ‘But once I knew who you were, then yes. Your weakness…. Thor’s punishment was obvious-‘ he breaks off to snort, ‘but it wasn’t enough. I could see you’d acclimatised. I’d planned to shake you up.’

 

Loki issues what is supposed to be a laugh, or some sound of amusement.  ‘What, with apple pie and poetry audiobooks?’

 

Stark’s smile was unkind. ‘Got it in one, Loki. You had loneliness wafting off you like an abandoned pup. I guess you could say I planned to kill you with kindness.’

 

He should not be so surprised, so betrayed – by how quickly Tony takes to calling him by his old name.

 

‘It is a pale sort of vengeance, coming from you.’

 

‘It’d do.’ Stark sinks into the sofa with a grunt. ‘So you’re blind and I’m bankrupt – we’re the two Bs. Busy bees. Busy bees never know when to stop. Buzzy buzzy beeeeees,’ he breaks off with a weird and broken laugh, like a badly-tuned guitar. ‘Perhaps we should have asked for a vowel eh, Reindeer Games? Rather than the whole damn world.’

 

It was a pale, poor joke. A pale, poor vengeance. A thin, vacuous puss of a hatred from a flesh – from a heart that had long gone to rot.

 

‘And this- _gift,_ was meant to remind me of all that I’ve lost?’

 

‘Christ you never change. It _was_ a gift- the only gift your brother thought would spare you. Would you have preferred to rot for all eternity on Asgard? Be trapped in a world of what ifs and regrets? He _spared_ you, Loki, you selfish prick. When the fuck will you ever _learn?’_

‘And what will you do to me now?

_‘Do?’_ Tony looked idly around. _‘_ Well I suppose I could throw you out of this window. But don’t you think you’ve suffered enough?’

 

‘Do _you?’_

 

They lapse into silence. Then Tony finally says in a softer voice than Loki have ever heard from him: ‘I have Alzheimer’s. There’s nothing you can do, Jingles. Don’t be sad.’ He twists his neck and looks directly at Loki, a full gaze. ‘I thought taking you out would be my swansong. One last bad guy taken care off, before I hit the road.’

 

‘You came here to kill me.’ As if saying it out aloud made it better.

 

Stark’s voice is bland and matter of fact. ‘Yes. I did.’

 

 _‘Ah.’_ Loki blinks. Things rush at him, emotions too vast and too vicious to belong to Lars. He sways, almost tipping over on the couch, and Tony catches him.

 

‘Lars, I- it’s not something I want you to think about any more.’

 

‘That’s not my name,’ Loki says faintly, blinking. It explained so much about his life. ‘I don’t have a name. I don’t… I don’t actually exist.’

 

Tony strokes his fringe, his forehead. ‘Don’t say that.’

 

‘So all this time I’ve been a placeholder for this… dead god? Is he the one who-’

 

‘You’re not a placeholder. You _are_ him.’

 

Loki looks away, out of the window he can see for the first time. It’s so beautiful out there.

 

Honestly, he thinks he wouldn’t mind if Stark had actually killed him. The invitation is on the tip of his tongue and Loki swallows it, because Tony is frowning; having made a speciality out of interpreting his silences.

 

‘Lars.’

 

‘My name’s Loki,’ the boy corrects wearily. ‘You’ve said it yourself.’

 

‘Don’t. You have every right to this life. It’s yours.’

 

He looks at Tony. The huntsman who couldn’t swing his axe. He picks up Tony’s hand and stares at brown-skinned knuckles and the mossy-coloured dirt beneath his nails. ‘What should I do?’

 

The older man simply shakes his head and the vivid golden flecks of his eyes turn black. ‘Whatever you want to do, but do it fast. You have twenty-four hours, kiddo.’ He looks at his watch. ‘Twenty-three and a half.’

 

‘I want-’ He licks his lips. ‘I want to spend it with you.’

 

‘I should have seen this coming,’ Tony shakes his head. ‘You’re a goddamn martyr, just like your brother. You need to get out of here, see what you can see. Go.’

 

‘Why?’

 

Tony sighs, exasperated. ‘Because I’m _dying,_ Jingles. I’m not young, and I’ve lead the life of a dissolute for too long. I came here with a vial and a gun. Do you know what that means? Do you want to forgive your would-be murderer?’

 

‘Thor can heal you.’

 

‘Nopes. Don’t want to be healed.’ He inhales with a sigh. ‘You can’t heal what’s broken inside, not even with all the apple pie in the world. I lied to Thor you know. Told him one thing, but really I just wanted to make sure you could see me before-‘

 

Despite his best efforts Loki flinches when he makes an air gun with his fingers. _‘Bang._ I wanted you to _know_ who I was before I used it.’

‘And where would you have gone after?’

 

‘Aside from straight to hell?’

 

_‘Tony.’_

 

‘I don’t know. Away. To the sea maybe. Or off a cliff.’

 

‘I’ll come with you. You don’t have to go alone.’

 

Tony is looking at him, flat and unreadable. ‘I came to take you out, and you offer to do me in instead.’

 

‘No, Tony.’ Lars shakes his head, to clear away all the alternate paths. ‘You came for retribution. And you’ll get it.’

 

He stands up, and this time when he move towards Tony he thinks he can finally see everything. The want hidden in that sharp, knife-like gaze. The way they both tremble when their fingers linked together.

 

‘But first, I _want_ that dance,’ Loki murmurs as he pulls his lover up to his feet. ‘And you’re going to give it to me.’

*

10

Holding Tony’s hand he leads them both to the bedroom he’s never seen. He sees the blue wallpaper he’s tried so hard to imagine all his life, the antique wooden chair with its tweed cushion, the plastic brightness of his braille computer. Things are not as in order as he’s assumed. Loki has always thought he was a fastidious cleaner, but without sight, it has merely been an assumption.

 

They stop before the bed. The sheets are a strange blush colour Loki doesn’t know the name off, but they look like home. Familiar.

‘Last chance,’ the older man with the sad eyes and unlovely face whispers, and it is all Loki can do not to grasp too greedily as he draws them both together; everything he’s dreamed off, except he never knew then how much things could change with his sight granted, a bouquet of bittersweet longing that would forever scent everything.

 

He draws the curtains shut around them before placing a painfully gentle hand on Tony’s cheek.

 

Tony’s arms come around, cradling his body, and his mouth comes down and kisses Loki, gentle but insistent, until he stops trembling. The sounds of breathing fill the room, the movement of moist lips. Of exhalation.

 

His eyes flutters involuntarily close no matter how much he tries to keep them open. He is greedy, so greedy for every little detail his eyes could draw in. Tony is lovely. He wants to tremble at the silken way their tongues rub, the way Tony touches him like they have all the time in the world when really they have none.

‘May I?’ he asks, but begins on Tony’s shirt without waiting for an answer. His fingers open each button with reverence, peels the shirt from him like a priest unveiling a Madonna.

Worship is beautiful, and Loki suddenly realises that a life time of music has prepared him for this moment, this gentle laying of hands on an instrument more delicate and profound than any other.

His hands trace a path from neck to chest to stomach, and he hears the music in Tony’s answering breath. Tony is lovely, and Loki has probably spent his past life trying to destroy everything.

Loki doesn’t remember what happened in the States just before he was born, but even as a blind boy in an unremarkable city a thousand miles away he had heard its bitter echoes, known that it had in some way changed the shape of the world.

That _he_ had changed the shape of the world.

 

Mouths still merging and exploring, they fall into the bed in a tangle of limbs and sighs, and Tony divests him of the rest of his clothing with a youthful speed that makes Loki almost bemused.

 

If truly he still has an old self, it does not emerge. There is no Loki voice in his head vying for expression, just an occasional twinge, like a stray pebble that occasionally rattles. The past and present destroy each other, they tumble together with his lacerated memories and form new things.

 

His heart shatters and renews, with each minute he stays in Tony’s arms. Loki can do nothing but painfully clear his throat, to hide the sound of his heart breaking and voice his awe softly. _I love you,_ his mind whispers the words he knows he can never say.

 

‘You’re beautiful,’ he says instead. ‘You’re beautiful.’

 

‘Blind _and_ mad,’ Tony husks. But his lips quirk, and Loki cannot help but smile at the reluctant pleasure he sees there. The slide of his tongue into Loki’s mouth feels nothing short of _profound._

 

‘Oh god,’ he whimpers as Tony touches him, and they are kissing over and over again between deep gasps of air and emotion, and Loki is dizzy with the fact that all this is allowed.

 

Tony would be beautiful to him even if he never received this gift of temporary sight. Tony with his creaking limbs and breathless huffs when they climb the stairs, Tony with his sharp, sharp words and wolfish laugh.

 

Loki knows the man’s genius, carefully rolled up and hidden away like a secret den of trophies - he knows the man’s foibles as well – it would have been impossible to love him otherwise.

 

He has never been attracted to perfection. Scars were beautiful, storied. Pain was what made the sleep sweet, the music glad, the breeze ephemeral.

 

‘Loki,’ Tony’s voice is completely wrecked, sanded down to almost nothing. ‘Loki, look at me.’

 

He opens his eyes, to eyes the colour of moist earth. Solid yet in its decomposition. Temperate and compassionate.

 

‘We only have the present, don’t we?’ he finally says hoarsely. The past is destroyed, there is no true sense of the future for either of them to imagine.

 

‘Yes, Loki.’

 

He burrows instead into Tony’s arms and squeezes his eyes shut. His body is young, too young to understand why his heartbeat wracks his entire frame like a heart attack and his breath trembles so.

 

‘I’m here,’ Tony breaths into him. ‘Return to me’.  And Loki does, willingly, greedily.

 

He keeps his eyes open.

 

*

 

In the end, they spend all 24 hours in Loki’s flat. Aside from the brief moment it takes to run to the door to greet the pizza delivery man, Tony’s half-hearted persuasions for them to leave the bed falls on deft ears. Loki does not need the wider world. He does not need seaside, sunsets, the view from the edge of a cliff.

 

He maps Tony’s body with both firm palm and skittering fingers, spends the currency of his time gloriously and selfishly examining each stretch of skin, sinew and bone with the delicacy of a sculptor. He memorizes as much as he can, knowing the music they will call up one day, beneath his hands on the piano.

 

In between, he watches the light filtering in through the window pane, the shadows moving across the room. At some point in time Tony get up and yanks the window open although it is too cold to do so, and the sounds of life comes flooding into their insulated world through this one single point of entry. Vehicles, footsteps, wind. The laughter of strangers, the caw of birds.

 

Tony beckons to him from the window, naked as the day he was born. ‘Come see.’

 

‘What?’

 

‘Come on. Don’t waste this, the sun’s about to set.’ His lover pats at the window sill, and Loki stumbles out from under his blankets, gleeful as a child in winter. Shoulder to shoulder, they spend time staring at the snow settling down upon the tree branches, the cars moving in orderly lines, Tony pointing out the colours on cars and the few species of animals that wintered with them. Loki refuses to cover up, despite shivering.

 

The cold dance just on this side of too much and makes him feel alive; it makes certain that Loki will never _forget_.

 

Tony huffs and rolls his eyes, but beyond wrapping an arm around his waist, said only: ‘I’m surprised you didn’t try to touch the bird.’

‘What bird?’

A beat passes before Tony carefully answers him, and his voice seems to have aged between one moment and the next. ‘Nothing. It’s not important.’

Tension slithers into Loki’s shoulders. ‘Tell me.’

‘There was a bird. One of those… spotted nutcrackers. Right in front of you.’ Tony’s arm squeezes his waist carefully. ‘It’s nothing.’

 _You’re losing your sight again_ , he doesn’t say.

‘No.’

Realisation swallows him whole. ‘No!’ he cannot help but cry again, clutching at his face. _‘No no no no.’_

He looks at Tony and realises that the older man’s features are now cloudy. Loki can no longer make out the fine lines on his face, or the precise hazel of his eyes, he was going to lose it all _again._

‘Loki. Loki. _Shhhhhh_ , its going to be ok.’

He can feel his breath hitching with tears, his body, his mind is still a child, and Loki can do nothing about how violently it feels. A steady murkiness begins to flow into his sight, like rainwater obstructing glass. He trembles.

‘I want my eyes back, don’t take it away, please, tell them, tell Thor-‘

_‘Loki, don’t-’_

 I’ll do anything,’ he’s sobbing like a child and its pointless and ridiculous but he can’t stop. ‘It’s so dark, Tony, I don’t want to go back there again. Do something- do- I don’t want-  the dark.’

The darkness. Oh, the darkness, the darkness. His legs go nerveless. He would fall, but Tony is there to catch him and carry him back to the safety of blankets and his arms.

‘I want you to kill me,’ he sobs. ‘Please, Tony. Please.’

 

‘Hold me,’ Tony whispers, over and over. ‘Hold me.’

 

Night falls. It falls so very swiftly, Loki thinks. It falls without mercy.

 

He chases the faint retreating shadows with his whole being, until there is no more. Until his hand finally drops away, and he recedes back into his world of sounds.

 

The sound of car tyres. The sound of the pedal’s exhalation on the piano as his foot releases the clutch.

 

The birds who have been listening in at the window fly away, chased by their own cries.

 

As the last of his sight leaves the music of the everyday that Loki has known so well returns, so there is consolation.

 

But he weeps anyway, and Tony holds him.

 

*

 

11

 

Loki wakes up to the smell of bacon fat and the sound of wind howling.

 

He is strangely empty, and calm. He keeps for now the emotions that will later shake him apart like a tree divesting itself of leaves in a storm. One day they will become so full as to drown him, but not now.

 

What is time to a man shackled to the wheels of fate? It will turn, it will take Loki down with it.

 

Yet he cannot bring himself to regret. After all he has wished for this, had he not? He had been _lonely._ Days of his youth, coaxing the keyboard to sing for him and keep the dark silences at bay. Perhaps even as a sightless mortal there was a magic in his longings, an ability to pull the threads of fate closer to him than other mortals. Even if he had no idea, even if all he did was keep his heart empty, silently asking the universe for something to fill it.

 

Now the silence has finally gone, and Loki does not know what remains. Or if anything has taken its place.

 

Tony pokes his head in, bringing on his heels the pungent and familiar smell of eggs and coffee. The scent of breakfast enters his room like children, boisterous and proclaiming loudly. 

 

Tony’s voice is not boisterous. ‘Are you all right?’

 

‘Yes. Yes I think so.’

 

‘Hungry? Never mind, you need to eat anyway. Come on, get up.’

 

‘I don’t want-‘

 

‘I’m not giving you a choice, Jingles, so up you get.’

 

Loki walks like a zombie, stumbling occasionally. He can’t seem to remember the lay of his own flat, so Tony places one hand on his shoulder and guides him from behind. The kitchen is warm and practically explodes with the smell of food – most of them oily.  Loki’s mouth waters at the smell of fried bacon.

 

‘Sit. Eat.’

 

‘Guess I’m hungry after all.’

 

‘Good because I might have overestimated – never mind.’

 

Tony waits till he is seated at the table before clearing his throat. ‘So let’s travel.’

 

‘Where?’

 

‘Nowhere. Everywhere.’

 

In lieu of an answer, Loki bites into a mouthful of egg. The yolk floods into his mouth, he can feel the golden colours on his tongue. They taste of memories. Not of Asgard, but of Mrs Auden’s cooking and Tony’s muffled nagging and the bakery he sometimes visited en route to practice.

 

‘It’s the middle of winter.’

 

‘Who are we, Lokes?’

 

Loki frowns. He hears the coffeepot lid being snapped open; the aroma hits him as Tony continues. ‘We’re two homeless birds. Its winter, and there’s no flock to guide us home. Those who could migrate away have long done so –‘

 

They were both not going to make it past the winter, Loki thinks.

 

He shrugs and cuts a piece of bacon. All the more reason then, not to worry about his weight.

 

‘But it’s not too late to I dunno… look around. There’s some old haunts I used to go to that I think you’d like.’

 

‘I have a route in mind but I’m open to suggestions,’ Tony continues blathering half to himself for a good ten minutes, drawing up plans before finally pausing to draw breath. ‘So what do you say?’

 

Loki busies himself with chewing. They both know his answer anyway.

 

He takes another slow bite, considering his options. He used to think that he was waiting for death. That his brother’s only boon (and it was still a boon) was to cut Loki from his immortal coil.

 

But you can either have Love, or Death. You can’t have both; they may not exist in the same space.

 

The eggs he thinks, taste of love.

*

**EPILOGUE:**

An agent receives Loki’s music in New York. There is a wealth of tracks on the recording – hundreds of songs, some sad and some happy, but each more beautiful than the next. Before the tracks play, a young boy speaks, so young as to have a voice barely broken by age. His voice wavers on the cusp of youth, and in some parts he stutters. Yet he speaks with a graveness more eloquent than time – so much so that one would be forgiven for thinking he had a soul as old as an ancient tree.

The studio decides to keep this boy’s recorded message secret, even as they release the tracks to the public to great reception – possibly the best the modern world has ever known to such kinds of music. Scholars wept, to learn of such genius extinguished before discovery. As for the boy, he proved tenacious in his disappearance, and none could discover his whereabouts.

Sometimes, however, the agent – now extremely wealthy thanks to the unprecedented movement of sales -  would take out the original CD with the boy’s tracks which had changed his life. He would make sure he was alone and his Jane was sound asleep before dimming the lights and sitting in the darkness. When he plays it, it is always silent for a few brief minutes,  with only the static of the surroundings for company – a room in the Tatras that the agent frequently tries to imagine. After this silence, a brief voiceover comes alive. It is the piano player’s quiet voice, fragmented and thin, but aside from his music, this is the only evidence the world has of him.  

This is the voiceover that he plays.

*

**Voiceover:**

 

_Some birds, they get lost during migration. They lose their flock, they lose their way. They keep flying anyway. Alone, across great expanses of water. We call them vagrants, and the sea swallows them up._

_Truth be told, one cannot die. One changes form – but death always belongs to other people. They who serve as witnesses to your life. You don’t experience your own death. The people you leave behind – they do._

_But I don’t pass you the music I wrote to talk about death. Instead I’d rather you listen to them, and think about life. Because the realm of music is firmly for the realm of life._

_You see, I think lovers can never write the end of their own love stories. Theirs is a world which must live only in eternity, accessed by bridges only they have the means to cross._ _It doesn’t matter. Tony and me, we’ll fly until we sink. We have to try. There’s a different shore each time to reach. There’s so many hues of blue to see._

 

_One day we’ll sink. But until then, we’ll fly._ _I hope you enjoy the music. They’re meant for the living._

 

_We don’t need it anymore._

 *

 

[FIN]

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to thank my collab-cum-artist Nimohtar so very much for all the lovely work and effort she put into this - I've never encountered this level of enthusiasm and pro-activeness from anyone for a fic before, and its been an absolute awe for me to just observe her working process. Thank you so much for giving me the chance!
> 
> And of course, to the hardworking Mods @ Frostiron Big Bang, this fest wouldn't have happened without you. Thank you. 
> 
> If you didnt manage to play the music list meant to accompany this story whilst reading, please have a listen:
> 
> [Click here](http://8tracks.com/lucius-complex/fortune-of-the-moon) [links to 8tracks] 


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